Writers praise work of Kurt Vonnegut who has died age 84

The novelist, journalist and humanist Kurt Vonnegut was lauded yesterday as one of the defining voices of post-war America following his death at the age of 84. Fellow writers and academics lined up to praise his work and his outspoken convictions in the wake of the second world war: one of the catchphrases of his novels, "so it goes" became the mantra of many opponents of the war in Vietnam.

Gore Vidal said Vonnegut was exceptionally imaginative among a post-war generation of writers that did not go in for that. "Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."

Norman Mailer hailed Vonnegut as "a marvellous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own". He said: "I would salute him as our own Mark Twain."

Tom Wolfe told the Los Angeles Times that Vonnegut "could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it, which made him quite remarkable".

Vonnegut wrote 14 novels, with a range that defied classification. Some were close to science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse Five, which propelled him to cult status with its exploration of the horrors of war.

Donald Morse, a professor at the University of Debrecen, in Hungary, and author of the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, said the writer was a champion of basic American values, as honorary president of the American humanist association. "He believed in community, that we all needed some extended family; in integrity, of which he was a model in his own life; and in courtesy and common decency."

Vonnegut's own heroes had been Jesus, Abraham Lincoln and Eugene Debs, the labour leader who stood several times for US president as candidate of the Socialist Party of America. During his troubled life he experienced the suicide of his mother shortly before he was dispatched to Europe in the second world war where he was captured by the Germans and held in Dresden during the Allied bombing.

He married twice and had three children. He also adopted a child with his second wife and cared for his sister's three children after she died. His surviving second wife, Jill Krementz, broke the news of his death on Wednesday. He had recently suffered a fall at his Manhattan home.

Tributes poured in from Indianapolis, where he was born in 1922. On the Indianapolis Star website a reader summed up the mood: "So it goes."